Poisons by contact and odor
"Once while perspiring from a long walk I undertook to bring in a large bunch of the Amanita for an artist. Seated in a close car, holding them in my warm hand, although protected by a paper wrapper, a fearful nausea overcame me. The toadstool was not at first suspected, yet I had all the symptoms of a sea-sick person, and was only relieved by a wide distance between myself and the exciting cause.
"While writing this article," he continues, "a friend sent me two very elegant specimens of the Amanita tribe. They were in a confined box. On opening it I smelled of them a few times, and allowed the box to lie near my desk while I wrote to a medical gentleman anxious to procure such for chemical experiment. Having sent them away the matter was dismissed from my mind for three hours after, when, by an attack of vomiting and oppression at the stomach, they were enforced upon my attention. The whites of my eyes became livid, and even until noon the day following the leaden color of my face was noticed by more than one person."
A wide berth to Amanita
The moral of this story is that the less the reader has to do with Amanita fungi the better. Let them have a wide berth, or at most an annihilating kick, lest by their alluring beauty they tempt the next unwary traveller who shall encounter them.
But you desire a specimen "to show a friend," or "to make a photograph of, or a sketch," perhaps. In such case it were well to consider further the experiences of Mr. Palmer, which will show the wisdom of keeping your gustatorial and artistic mycology in separate expeditions, or at least of providing your poison-exhaling Amanita specimen with a cage by itself. In the same article he continues:
Mushrooms inoculated by contact
"Mushrooms make the same use of the atmosphere as men, even their exhalations are accordingly vitiated with their properties. Those not deadly thus attack humanity—namely, by absorption of their essential elements by the whole system. They also inoculate each other with or without contact, so that if edible and noxious toadstools are gathered together the former will absorb the properties of the latter."
In proof of this assertion he instances a personal experience as follows: "About four years ago a number of poisonous mushrooms (not Amanitæ, but of a totally different family) were sent me with edible fungus. The two varieties had lain twelve hours in the same box. The noxious ones were rejected, and the esculent washed and eaten. In a moment my appetite was gone; violent perspiration, vertigo, and trembling were the next symptoms; then chills, nausea, purging, and tenesmus, all within thirty minutes. Now the substance could not have reached the intestines. The virus absorbed from the noxious fungus permeated the whole system through eating the harmless ones; unmixed with other food it acted upon the muscles through an empty stomach; once spent, the ailment passed off," etc.
Poison extracted by vinegar